In the olden days, before I had my current job, I was dreaming of retirement all the time. Whenever I couldn't cope any more, I would console myself with this dream of eventual freedom from wage-slavery. Just wait 'til I am 60, I thought, and then I'll live!
So now that the government keeps increasing the retirement age, you would think that I feel cheated and heart-broken. Not a bit of it! Instead I am plotting to work as long as possible, hoping fervently that the retirement age will further increase, so I can work as long as possible. Because now I have a job I love!
It came towards the end of my working life, and after decades of wage-slavery I really appreciate it. A bad job will poison your entire existence, but if you have a good job it gives you a brilliant life! Free entertainment, interesting activities, lovely colleagues, a ready made social life, free tea and toilet paper - what's not to like? Why can't it always be like that?
People who dream of early retirement are people who don't really like their job, usually for a variety of excellent reasons. In my opinion most people are naturally industrious, it is the treatment they receive at work that makes them feel like slaves. Like truculent, malcontent, sabotaging, lazy slaves!
Otherwise, how do you explain the industriousness most people develop as soon as they retire? They travel around the world, take up labour-intensive hobbies, work as volunteers in charity shops, care for old folks, babysit their grandchildren - this is all work, unpaid work at that, and they seem to thrive on it! And if you try to organise any kind of social get-together with them, it is harder than when they had a job.
You would have thought after a life-time of hard graft they would put up their feet and take things easy, but not a bit of it. It is almost as though they are determined to finally, after the end of their official working life, work like they like it - not as their idiot managers forced them to. Sort of like people who set up their own business to be their own boss - except they don't get paid.
So if the government wants to save on pensions and make us work until we drop dead and loving it they should reform the workplace! Do some research and find out what people like and dislike about their jobs, change the workplace, and save tons of money on pensions!
It's not really all that difficult. Stop infantilising employees by making them follow dumb procedures and work in ways that they, and their employers, know are completely pointless and often demotivating, like health & safety, back to work after illness interviews, annual assessments, endless meetings, rampant jargon, egotistical managers, ill-though-out assignments, motivational training, Human Resources - oh yes, abolish HR altogether; as necessary as a goiter, my father used to say, and just as debilitating. And the insult, of being referred to as a 'resource' - I am not a resource, I am a human being, and if you don't treat me as one I will limit myself to being 'the resource', and withhold all those qualities and talents that aren't part of the 'resource' I am paid to be, but are probably the best part of me.
Get it into your tiny heads, you people who manage others, that we are naturally motivated to do a good job, and keen to succeed. But after a life-time of being forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to be allowed to do our job properly and as we see fit, is it a surprise that we finally give up, and just do time, dreaming of retirement and the day we can leave the Hell-Hotel that most work places are?
Why is it that most places I have ever worked in preferred that I did things wrong their way than right my way? Why are most bosses so insecure that they cannot abide employees who don't need them to a good job, except to occasionally knock heads together or come up with additional funds? Why are there so many people in organisations who are allowed to make life miserable for their colleagues, as long as they toe the company line? Why are employees harassed for being off sick, when they work countless hours of unpaid overtime which more than make up for it?
I am sorry this is turning into a rant, and I really must stop, but it infuriates me that so many working lives are blighted, and so many bright self-motivated employees become frustrated unmotivated wrecks, because they are mismanaged by inept bosses who are more concerned about protecting their pathetic fragile little egos than in getting the job done for the company.
In a world where we will have to work ever longer years, the work place must be reformed until it is a place where people actually want to be for reasons other than money - otherwise expect ever lower productivity and miserable workplace atmospheres, full of people who can't wait to escape and are just doing time, increasingly angry at not being able to retire because pensions are so low.
The office shouldn't be a place where people pretend to work, longingly waiting for the weekend and retirement, consoling themselves with the mantra of 'This, too will pass'! It is not good for the employer who gets low productivity, not good for the workers who basically waste their lives, and bad for society who has to deal with frustrated people who long for a more meaningful existence.
You have read the book 'Bonjour Lazyness, Why hard work doesn't pay' by Corinne Maier? So true so true so true!
